Christ at the Center

We will never find peace in the midst of our worries and problems by thinking our way through them. Thought is a false labyrinth that always returns us to the same confused starting point. Prayer is the true labyrinth that takes us deeper than thought and leads us to the peace that “passes all understanding.” Letting go of our anxieties is our greatest difficulty, which testifies to the negative resilience of the ego. Yet it is so simple. We have only to grasp the true nature of meditation: not that we are trying to think of nothing, but that we are not thinking. [. . . .]

In many ancient labyrinths it was a monster that was found at the center, a thing of fear and a threat to life. The Christian labyrinths positioned Christ at the center of all the twists and turns of life. In Christ we find not fear but the dissolving of fear in the final and primal certainty of love. Meditation is the work of love and it is by love, not by thought, that God ultimately is known: the knowledge that saves is the knowledge of love. This is why John Main describes our human experience of love as the best way to understand why we meditate and how meditation takes us into reality.

As in any relationship we pass through stages. At each stage of growth there will always be a crisis, another leap of faith. We all pass through cycles: enthusiasm, struggle with discipline, dryness, despair, temporary enlightenments. But as fellow pilgrims, we can always remind each other from within the labyrinth that the center is our true home. And we remember that the flashes of joy, the temporary awakenings are emanations of the love that is the nature of reality. . .

Laurence Freeman OSB, “Letter One,” WEB OF SILENCE (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 1996).